A wide variety of sensor types are required to monitor assets like an office building, a store or a large campus. In addition, a number of these sensors are required for monitoring large assets. It is therefore preferred to have very low cost sensors. The sensor data must typically be processed, analyzed, and communicated to a remote location for further analysis. Communicating sensor data over long distances by wires is very cumbersome, prone to damage and comes with a high cost of installation and time. On the other hand, having wireless communication capabilities in each sensor is highly cost prohibitive and power inefficient. Moreover, there are a large number of sensor electrical interfaces that are different from each other.
To solve the problem of connecting a large number of different sensor types of sensors to a remote location in an efficient manner, a highly flexible, configurable, scalable and power efficient sensor interface architecture has been devised. Multiple sensors with a wide variety of electrical interfaces in a localized area can be connected by wire to a unit called the Sensor Interface Relay (SIR) that hosts the flexible sensor interface architecture.
The SIR can gather data from multiple sensors, process and analyze the data, and then relay the data to a remote location via wired or wireless communications as needed. In order to do this, the SIR architecture allows multiple sensors with different electrical interfaces to be connected to it via sensor ports. The data analysis is performed by the first processing unit (the main micro-controller PSoC5). The micro-controller has an embedded ARM Cortex M3 CPU that is used to analyze the sensor data and also perform other functions. Commercially available or custom software can be used to calculate statistical or application-specific analytics on the first processing unit. The architecture is highly flexible by allowing any of the supported sensor interfaces to be connected to any sensor port in any combination. It is highly configurable by allowing any of the sensor ports to be programmed to interface with any supported sensor. The architecture can be easily scaled to support a large number of sensors using one SIR. By being power efficient, the SIR can operate on battery power without the need for battery replacement for a long time.